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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The album takes flight with a tone generator dropping in pitch until it splashes down into the wide blue open. ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is meant to function as a descent; a drop that continues all along the record in various ways. Lyrically and sonically we have somehow been drawn towards working with a bending and falling feeling on this album. One could characterize The Drop as being somewhat darker than what we’ve done before. This darkness is not to be seen as one of a more serious or solemn nature, simply one that stressed the immersive sensibility of being lowered down into a murky substance with different laws of orientation. The opening track sums up a movement where the ever changing is contrasted by a constant, static element. In this case bass and drums keeps a rather horizontal beat going whereas the surrounding elements have an elastic and highly bendable flavour to them. The title refers to an oceanic wasteland of debris located in the North Pacific. A suiting picture for a world doing wrong and – a suiting picture for the sound of this record, which is made up from a rubble of ideas that were mashed together during a very short period of one week of recording and three weeks of dubbing and mixing.

Necromancer

This track is probably the most mechanical and motorized one on the record. It arouse from some jam sessions we had in a remote cottage in the far north of Danish main peninsula, Jutland. While being very strict and automatic in its apparent structure, it also inhabits a world of arabesque ornaments of mystical and otherworldly derivation. Our fascination with the fantasy genre (and all of its tacky clichés) probably brought out the necromancer as a persona that suits the feel of this tune. The necromancer is a shamanistic character that can communicate across time and space with the dead. This track is all about the meter, the beat, but more importantly what happens between the notes, between the lines and inside the realms that the dead inhabit.

Moped

‘Moped’ is probably one of the oldest tunes on this record. It has gone through various stages of appearance live, before it was finally captured in this version. The trip is mostly about energy for us. We have tried to create a pretty massive wall-of-sound like soundscape, where pounding drums and pulsing synth drones serve as the primary fuel. The idea has been to max up the denseness, but mix it in a way where the listener can still settle in the depth on the soundscape. Jaleh’s cheerleader like vocals function as a constant kick-starter for this highway ride, where new guitar motives are being introduced as we go along. For us listening to this reminds us of being 18 and driving through the country side with ones gang and the wind in our hair. Or playing a motorbike arcade game, where temporary and loosely connected bits of sound and lyrics shoot before your ears like blitzing rays of light.

The Swollen Map

Inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges’ idea of the map that grows larger than the actual landscape, this song is partly about the representation of the world, and about how to navigate in your own way in a world swarmed with symbolic significance. Technically the song consists of separately recorded bitcrushed piano chords that sustain and ring on through the whole track. Our friend Nils Gröndahl played the helicopter like strings towards the end, where the track freezes and repeats while the strings keep moving upwards towards a complete view of the map – it fails.

Pyromancer

‘Pyromancer’ stands as another take on nurturing the tension between the constant repetition and the ever evolving. Rhythmically pretty much every hole is filled on this track. Different feelings and musical periods meet and produce and a trancy grid together. The guitar roles are more like percussion instruments than actual tonal instruments. While these just move in circles, the vocal melody only moves forward with new melody lines overtaking the previous almost without repetition. So you get sort of warped between the cyclical and the linear.

Tin Can Valley

Like ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ ‘Tin Can Valley’ constitutes another wasteland on the record. Alongside Moped it was recorded live in The Livingston Studios in London, unlike the other tracks on the record. Again we are working with a constant drone beat and an evolution on top of that. This time around the guitars are the ones with the forward moving roles. Unlike most of what we usually do, the guitar parts were written before we ever played the tune together. And I guess half of the music heard on this record is composed that way, and the other half comes from improvising and playing around and going with the spark of the moment.

I Said Hell You Said No

Here we have the track that was most likely the one with most loose ideas on the table before we started our recordings. Or put in another way, this is the track where we tried to fit quite a lot of non-corresponding ideas into one framework. For a long time it didn’t really work out, but in the end it turned out nicely and confusing in an interesting way. We actually ended up switching around beginning and end once we had mixed it halfway through. Recording Jakob’s string arrangement with Nils Gröndahl gave it a nice cinematic touch. The lyrics are formed in an associative manner blending mythology with horror movie scenarios and channelling these into the subconscious logic of the dream/nightmare world.

Down In The Liverpool Stream

Having fallen through the record you end up in this bubbly song. The drop ends up being concretized with this very watery feeling, and the protagonist of the song ends up floating “like a jelly fish/down in the Liverpool stream”. So, we see the drop both as a fall, but also as a drop creating ripples that resonate throughout the whole record. The song was recorded at home with acoustic guitars and a weird little toy accordion we borrowed from a friend of ours. We wanted to do an actual folk song, but we also wanted to place that song inside some sort of minimalistic pulsing landscape, where the vocals and lyrics were to be equal to rest of the arrangement.

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